Boomer eZine

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Table of Contents for this issue.....

1. Welcome to New Subscribers

2. Wikipedia Definition of Infopreneur

3. Search Engine Optimization

4. Cajun joke

5. How Graphics Appear on Web Pages

Author's Comments

For the Boomer cat lovers. I realize that I must give cat lovers equal time after my comments about my dogs last week. Linda and I have had cats for many years. (If you asked the cats, they would have told you that they had us). We currently have a black cat named Boo whose job it is to keep the buffalos away from our house and yard. I guess that she is doing a good job since we have never seen a buffalo around here. Click here to see Boo helping me write this issue of Boomer eZine.

Linda was off this week with friends at the lake. She practiced with a friend’s kayak. She really liked this kayak better than the one she used when we took lessons. She and her friend spent time in the lake tipping the kayak over and practicing getting back in it. She came home exhausted. Now all I have to do is get her to stay awake long enough to proof this issue.

Welcome to our New Subscribers from the Tim Knox Newsletter

Welcome to all our new subscribers. Tim Knox is my friend and mentor and he is a great one. I met Tim when I attended the Tim and Jim Internet Boot Camp in Huntsville , AL last April (Article and pictures at http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I3_042406.htm). I realized that I could learn a lot from Tim so I signed up for his mentoring program. It has been a great experience, and I continue to learn from the master. Thanks, Tim, for your support.

Wikipedia definition of Infopreneur

In the process of doing research for the article in last week’s issue, I was amazed to discover that there was not a definition for “infopreneur” in Wikipedia. So I wrote and published an article. Check it out at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infopreneur.

Wikipedia is an interesting site where people contribute their knowledge to create the database. Since it is a free access database, one needs to be cautious of using new definitions from Wikipedia without verifying them.

You can publish new articles on Wikipedia or you can edit and comment on any article that you read on the site. All you have to do is open an account (free) and you are ready to go. Give it a try and be a contributor to Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

If you publish or edit on Wikipedia, you get exposure for your contribution. This makes you an expert which is one of your goals in building a reputation on the Internet. Any place you can put your tagline on the Internet helps your reputation and leaves links pointing back to your website or blog.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

To start this article, let’s make certain that everyone knows what a search engine (SE) is. This is a website that will accept an input word or phrase and search a database to give you information that matches the input information that you supplied to it. The best known SE’s are Google and Yahoo.

There are many definitions for SEO so I will try to boil them down into a simple one. My condensed definition of SEO is -- SEO is the action of using techniques to make your page(s) appeal to search engines so they will rank the page high in the search engine results pages (SERP). For additional definitions, run a Google search and you will get plenty of reading on the subject.

Why be concerned about the SERP ranking? This is what produces your free traffic that found you all by themselves using the SE. This traffic is the life blood of your business. Another consideration about SE traffic …. Readers who find you through the SE’s are much more open to what you have to say or offer since they found you on their own. They were looking for you. This is a different situation from coming to your location from a sales page or a pay per click ad. When they come via these methods, they are immediately suspicious and wary of a sales pitch. This makes them much harder to sell.

SEO has created the profession of search engine optimizer. This profession breaks down into two groups called the white hats and the black hats. (I guess this is from the old western movies where the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black hats).

The white hats work to create good, solid content that the SE’s are looking for. Their form of optimization is presenting the good, solid material in a format which appeals to the SE.

The black hats try to trick the SE into thinking that a site has valuable information on it by various methods and tricks.

When search engines (SE’s) first came on the scene, they were not very sophisticated and people on the Net found ways to easily trick them into giving a page a higher ranking on the SERP than the page deserved.

The first black hat trick that I remember hearing about was to fill in all the white space on the page with the page keyword in white font color (white letters on a white background). If the page was viewed on the screen, it looked normal with five or six keyword occurrences, but if you looked at the HTML, you would see the keyword on the page say 300 times. This was called “increasing keyword density” and this worked for a short time until the SE’s got smarter. When they learned to look at the background color and the font color for these 300 keywords, the SE’s started penalizing the website for cheating. The interaction between the black hat SEO’s and the search engines has developed into a “cat and mouse” game and is still on going.

Google has some of the best minds on the Net working for it and those minds are constantly working to stay ahead of the “black hats”.

It is not uncommon for a “black hat” page to be ranked well in the SERP’s one day and gone the next. This is because Google has changed its algorithm for what it considers relevant on the page. The black hat tricks that worked yesterday were discovered and the page is gone from Google or ranked so far back in the SERP that it is “dead meat”.

Google has a goal to rank pages with outstanding, relevant content high on the SERP and if you create that outstanding, relevant content and develop traffic, your page will rise in the SERP rank. You are not trying to fool Google, you are trying to build what Google wants.

I learned this information from using Site Build It (SBI) since it guides you through this part of building your page. Each time you create a page, you first preview it to see that it meets your visual requirements. Then you submit it to “Analyze It” a program that evaluates the page. Once it has done its evaluation, it opens a new window that tells you what it detected that needs to be changed to make the page more acceptable to search engine spiders.

You make the changes to the page and resubmit to “Analyze It” until it gives you a report with no more suggestions. At that point, you preview the page to make certain your changes have not affected the visual presentation and it is ready to publish.

The following are a few SBI guidelines what I learned from building retirement jobs online.com on Site Build It. If you follow these guidelines, you will build a page that is structured the way the SE’s like.

1. The web page file name should contain the primary keyword. For retirement jobs online.com this would be “retirement-jobs-online.com/keyword.html.

2. The page title should contain the primary keyword. This is the Title tag in the HTML code.

3. The page description should contain the primary keyword. This is the description meta tag.

4. The keyword list should begin with the primary keyword. This is the keywords meta tag.

5. The first heading in the body should contain the primary keyword. This will be the H1, H2, or H3 tags in HTML. “H” tags indicate a heading which will be bold font. The 1, 2, or 3 indicate the size of the font for the heading.

6. The keyword should appear in the first 90 visible characters of the text.

7. The key word should appear a moderate number of times in the body. Here is where it gets a little fuzzy. Too few occurrences will not help you and too many occurrences can be considered “keyword spamming”. I do not know the exact formula, I just do what SBI says. Quite often “Analyze It” tells me to lower the occur aces of keywords on a page.

8. The keyword should appear in the text of a text link on the page.

If you build your own website, you will need to know HTML so you can fill in the Title and the meta tags for the keywords and the description. This is not hard to do and you can learn it without too much trouble. If you use SBI, you fill in text boxes in the template that it gives you and it writes the HTML for this.

If you are using MS Internet Explorer, to see the HTML for these inputs, go to www.retirement-jobs-online.com and right click in the center of the page. Click View Source in the dropdown box and a Notepad window will open with the HTML code for the page. Here is what you will see near the top:

___________________________

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<TITLE>Retirement Jobs Online - retirement jobs online for people over 50</TITLE>

____________________________

The <TITLE> tag is the page title.

The <META Name="Description" Content= is the description.

The <META Name="Keywords" Content= is the keyword list.

You can write this HTML if you just use the tags exactly like they appear and insert your text between the quotation marks.

On the title tag, don’t forget the closing tag. Almost all tags in HTML end with the same tag as the beginning except the tag name will have a forward slash in front of it. As an example, the closing tag for the title tag is </TITLE>.

Enough HTML lesson! All I wanted to do was to show you where these various inputs appeared on the page. If you build your own website, do not forget to fill these out each time you build a page.

Also, having a site map for your site in the format that Google and Yahoo suggest helps your page’s ranking. See Volume 1 Issue 16 http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I16_072806.htm and Volume 1 Issue 17 http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I17_080406.htm for information about site maps.

I have learned this from building pages on SBI so I am not going to claim to be a genius on the subject. I just know that SBI techniques get results, and I am seeing those results on www.retirement–jobs-online.com.

In a survey, 1000 SBI sites were randomly selected by an independent research firm and then Alexa.com was used to measure the rank of these sites. Here are the results:

35% of the 1000 SBI sites ranked in the top 1% of all sites (i.e., their Alexa Traffic Rank was in the Top 560,000, higher than 99% of all sites on the Web).
53% were in the top 2%
62% scored in the top 3%.

I consider those to be convincing numbers. If you want more information about Site Build It, go to http://proof.sitesell.com/boomer.html.

In summary, do not chase after the latest “hot” SEO technique. Focus on creating great content and follow a few rules on how to structure your page and no matter how Google changes its SE algorithm, your pages should continue to rank well.

How Do It Do Dat?

If you ask my wife and children, I am always asking the question “How does that work?” My degree is in physics, and my scientific mind is always trying to figure out how something works.

I am reminded of the joke that is told in many different geographic locations. If you are in Canada , it is a Newfie joke, in the Eastern US , it is a Polack joke, in Louisiana , it is a Cajun joke, in Texas , it is an Aggie joke, and anywhere it can be a blonde joke. Let’s make it a Cajun joke.

Three Cajuns, Boudreaux, Robicheaux and Thibodeaux were discussing the greatest inventions of all time? Boudreaux thought that the jet airplanes were the greatest. "Those 747s can carry so many people, so far, so fast." What do you t'ink, Robicheaux? Robicheaux thought that computers were the greatest invention. "You can see so much information on dere. All over da whole world! Right in yer own living room." They looked at Thibodeaux, "What do you t'ink?" Thibodeaux thought for a minute and said, "I t'ink dat da Thermos bottle is the greatest invention." "What? Why do say dat? All it does is keep t'ings hot or keep t'ings cold." And Thibodeaux says, "Yeah, but how does it know?"

I found a follow up to this joke. Boudreaux was so impressed with Thibodeaux’ idea that him bought himself a thermos bottle. When Thibodeaux saw him at work the next week, him say, Hey Boudreaux, whatcha got in your thermos?” Boudreaux answer, “Some hot gumbo and two Popsicles.”

Now on to “How do it do dat?”

How Graphics Appear on Web Pages

You all know that the web page you are viewing is generated by your browser from the HTML code that it received when you told it to load this page. If you are using Internet Explorer and reading this on the Boomer eZine.com site, position your cursor in the middle of the page away from any table or graphic and right click your mouse. On the drop down box, click View Source. Notepad will open a window that will display the HTML code for the page that you are viewing.

If you do this on a page with a picture or graphic, you will not see the picture or graphic embedded in the HTML, but rather in its place, you will see some HTML code that says this:

“img src” is the HTML code that tells the browser where to go to get the image. The numbers after it are the size in pixels on the screen.

This tip applies to eBay since you can place pictures in your description box on eBay and you do not have to pay for any pictures that you supply if they are not hosted in the eBay picture gallery.

The eBay description box will allow you to use some basic HTML formatting to insert pictures.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following example is time sensitive and the links to the Mickey Mouse Calculator will not work after August 20, 2006 . The narrative of the example is still valid so don’t stop reading the valuable information that follows.

As an example, go to this link to see an item that I currently have on auction at the eBay Boomer Retirement Store http://stores.ebay.com/BOOMER-RETIREMENT-STORE. When you get there click on the Mickey Mouse Head Calculator.

When the Mickey Mouse Calculator page loads, position your cursor over any of the pictures of the calculator and right click. Select Properties on the drop down box and it will tell you where the picture is located on the Net. In this case, the picture location is:

http://www.boomer-ezine.com/images/eBay_Pictures/Mickey_Calculator1.JPG

If you click the above link, you will be able to view the picture directly from the boomer-ezine.com website.

The HTML in the page that specifies the middle picture on the page is:

This tells the browser to center the image on the page (align=”center”, there is no border around the image (img border=0), get the image from the address on the boomer-ezine.com site and the picture is 288 pixels wide and 294 high. The <p and </p> tags begin and end a paragraph.

I think that this technology is great. You can post a picture on any website on the Net and you can load it into the page of any another website. The amazing thing is that all this is done in the time it takes for the browser to load and format the page. This is why sometimes you see the page text load first and the pictures loads a little after it. Also, if you see a blank frame with a small red X in it, this means that the link to the picture was broken or the website host was down and the picture could not be accessed.

One other eBay tip …..Notice the time when the Mickey Mouse Calculator auction ends. It is August 20 at 19:52 PDT (Sunday evening). It is a proven fact that the best time to end an eBay auction is Sunday evening. This one ends just before 8:00PM PDT so it is in the ideal time range to end an auction in the United States . Remember this for your future eBay auctions.

Here is my sales pitch. While you are at the Boomer Retirement Store, bid on the Mickey Mouse Calculator as a gift for your grandchild. There has not been much activity on it and you might be able to “steal” it when no one is looking. There is no reserve on it so it will go for whatever the auction brings. Good luck and good bidding!

Building Lists

Linda and I were reviewing past issues of Boomer eZine, and we realized that we have not discussed one of the most important actions needed to be successful on the Internet. That is building a mailing list.

We will cure this oversight next week when we take on the topic of building lists. Until next week, stay tuned.

John and Linda Howe

www.boomer-ezine.com

www.boomer-entrepreneur.com

www.boomer-marketplace.com

http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com

http://stores.ebay.com/BOOMER-RETIREMENT-STORE

If you are changing email addresses in the future, put a note on your calendar to send us a blank email after you have changed your address. Send the blank email to: boomerezine001@aweber.com. We want you to remain a subscriber to our newsletter!

It is OK to go ahead and join our subscriber list with more than one email address. You never know when an email will be blocked these days. The SPAM filters are getting tighter and tighter and are blocking many legitimate emails.

If a friend sent you this newsletter, you need to send a blank email to:

boomerezine001@aweber.com

and we will send you your own copy on the next issue.

Boomer eZine Home

Table of Contents

Please visit the other Boomer sites

www.frugal-senior.com	www.retirement-jobs-online.com
www.best-retirement-calculators.com	www.the-best-GPS.com
www.the-best-web-host.com	www.the-best-HDTV.com

Volume 1 Issue 19 8-18-06